Master of Men

By E. Phillips Oppenheim

Enoch Strone is a book-loving rustic loner who lives in a remote hand-built cabin. He works as a mechanical engineer in the industrial town of Gascester. One evening he meets a poor factory girl, Milly, who has been abandoned by her friends during a walk in the woods. On the same day he is accosted by the Reverand Martinghoe who introduces Strone to his beautiful, widowed, wealthy sister Lady Malingcourt. Strone is bewitched by her lovely singing and the seductive manners of the jaded upper class widow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Classica Libris
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9791222008318

E. Phillips Oppenheim

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was a bestselling English novelist. Born in London, he attended London Grammar School until financial hardship forced his family to withdraw him in 1883. For the next two decades, he worked for his father’s business as a leather merchant, but pursued a career as a writer on the side. With help from his father, he published his first novel, Expiation, in 1887, launching a career that would see him write well over one hundred works of fiction. In 1892, Oppenheim married Elise Clara Hopkins, with whom he raised a daughter. During the Great War, Oppenheim wrote propagandist fiction while working for the Ministry of Information. As he grew older, he began dictating his novels to a secretary, at one point managing to compose seven books in a single year. With the success of such novels as The Great Impersonation (1920), Oppenheim was able to purchase a villa in France, a house on the island of Guernsey, and a yacht. Unable to stay in Guernsey during the Second World War, he managed to return before his death in 1946 at the age of 79.

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E. Phillips Oppenheim

MASTER OF MEN

Copyright

First published in 1901

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Master of Men

Upward in long sinuous bends the road wound its way into the heart of the hills. The man, steadily climbing to the summit, changed hands upon the bicycle he was pushing, and wiped sweat from his grimy forehead. It had been a gray morning when he had left, with no promise of this burst of streaming sunshine. Yet the steep hill troubled him but little—he stepped blithely forward with little sign of fatigue. His workman’s clothes, open at the throat, showed him the possessor of a magnificent pair of shoulders; the suggestion of great physical strength was carried out also in his hard, clean-cut features and deep-set, piercing gray eyes. He passed a grove where the ground was blue with budding hyacinths, and he loitered for a moment, leaning upon the saddle of his bicycle, and gazing up the sunlit glade. A line or two of Keats sprang to his lips. As he uttered them a transfiguring change swept across his face, still black in patches, as though from grimy labour. His hard, straight mouth relaxed into a very pleasant curve; a softer light flashed in his steely eyes. He reached a wooden gate at last on his right-hand side, and, pushing it open, skirted a stone wall until he came to a sudden dip in the field, and with its back against a rocky eminence, a tiny cottage built of the stones which lay in heaps about the turf. He leaned his bicycle against the wall, and, taking a key from his pocket, unlocked the door.

Saturday at last, he exclaimed aloud. Thirty-six hours of freedom. Phew!

He had plunged a basin into the soft-water tank outside and held his head in it for a moment. Then, all dripping, he carried a canful to a hollow bath ingeniously fixed among the rocks against which the cottage was built, and, throwing off his soiled clothes, jumped in. There was no longer any sign of the grease-stained mechanic when he emerged, and, with his towel wrapped lightly around him, stepped into the cottage. He reappeared in a few minutes clad in a gray homespun suit, which showed many signs of wear, a pipe in his mouth, a book in his hand. Leisurely he filled a kettle from the well and thrust it into the centre of the small wood fire, which he had kindled. Then, with a sigh of relief, he threw himself upon the soft, mossy turf. The book lay unheeded by his side. From his high vantage point he looked downward at the wide panorama which stretched to the horizon, faintly and mistily blue. The glorious spring sunshine lay like a quickening fire upon the land.

The treetops, moving lightly in the west wind, were budding into tender green; the dark pine groves were softened; the patches of rich brown soil, freshly turned by the plow, gleamed as though with promise of the crops to come. Below him the dusty lane along which he had travelled stretched like a narrow white belt, vanishing here and there in the woods and disappearing at times between lichen-stained gray walls. He traced it backward across the silvery brook, back to the quaint village with its clustering gray stone houses, red-tiled roofs, and strange church tower, and watched for a moment the delicate wreaths of smoke curl upward, straight with the promise of fine weather. Farther still he followed it into the flat country past the reservoir, a brilliant streak of scintillating light, back into the heart of the town whence he had come, and which stretched there now in the middle distance a medley of factory chimneys and miles of houses—a great foul blot upon the fair landscape.

He remembered it as he had ridden out an hour or so ago, the outskirts with all their depressing ugliness, a cobbled road, a shabby tramcar with a tired horse creeping along a road where dirty children played weary games and shouted shrilly to one another. A miserable region of smoke-begrimed houses and small shops, an unattractive public house at every corner, round which loafed men with the white faces of tired animals, and women dragging babies and shouting abuse to their more venturesome offspring. With painful distinctness he saw it all—the opened factory gates, the belching out of a slatternly mob of shrieking girls and ribald youths, the streets untidy with the refuse of the greengrocers’ shops, the hot, fetid atmosphere of the low-lying town. He closed his eyes—ah, how swiftly it all vanished! In his ears was the pleasant chirping of many insects, the glorious sunshine lay about him like wine, the west wind made music in the woods, one thrush in particular was singing to him blithely from the thatched roof of his cottage—a single throbbing note against a melodious background of the whole woodful of twittering birds. The man smiled to himself, well pleased.

Then his thoughts in relief slipped away from the present to the little perfumed garden of the vicarage across the hills. He was there in the deepening twilight listening in wonder to the song that floated on the still air. The voice was that of a woman such as Strone had never looked upon before. He closed his eyes with